The Healthy Church Playbook: 10 Building Blocks for Thriving Ministry

60-80% of churches in America are stuck or shrinking. And the average Sunday gathering? Fewer than 60 people. Even worse, less than half of attenders are engaged in discipleship environments like small groups.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. In fact, it can’t be. Your community needs your church to be a healthy, disciple-making church that’s alive with vision, grounded in the gospel, and multiplying leaders for the next decade of ministry impact.

In this article, I’m going to walk you through The Healthy Church Playbook – 10 building blocks that can take any church from stuck to thriving.

These are the same vital pieces I help pastors implement inside Intentional Pastor University, my 6-month coaching program designed to help you lead a healthy, disciple-making church without losing your soul (more on that at the end).

Here's a free Team Discussion Guide that brings all the building blocks and corresponding questions together so you can lead your team intentionally.

The Healthy Church Playbook: 10 Building Blocks for Thriving Ministry

1. Prayer Saturated Soil

Jesus described the sower who spread seed wherever he went. The same amount of work was done no matter where the sower went. His actions were consistent. But the soil made all the difference.

Healthy churches are praying churches. Because it’s through prayer that the Spirit tills the soil of our hearts. Thriving churches go to the throne room before they go to the meeting room. And then? They turn the meeting room into a prayer room.

Questions to discuss with your team:

• How visible and vibrant is prayer in the life of our church beyond Sunday services?
• In the past quarter, how have we equipped our people to pray for one another and our community?
• What is the boldest thing we’ve asked the Lord to do in the last thirty days?

2. Leadership Clarity and Courage

When the seas get turbulent, a ship needs both a clear direction and a captain and crew who are willing to stay the course when the storms begin to crash. In the same way, churches need leaders who are prayerfully steadfast, knowing where they’re going and are willing to lead there with conviction – even when the winds of people’s opinions start to rage.

Healthy churches are led by shepherds who aren’t afraid to confront reality, speak the truth in love, and take kingdom-fueled risks. Thriving churches have leaders who live out their calling with courage, humility, and assertiveness.

Questions to discuss with your team:

• Do you understand how God has wired you and what your greatest contribution to our church is? Is your job description aligned with that?
• What hard decisions have we been putting off that we know we need to make?
• How often are we leading from conviction rather than convenience?

3. People Passion and Pursuit

Like the shepherd who left the 99 to find the 1 lost sheep, thriving + healthy churches passionately pursue people with the hope of Jesus. People aren’t just the mission, they’re the passion. Healthy churches understand that the way they love people is the way they love God. If they don’t love their neighbors, how can they say they love God? Shout out to the apostle John.

Jesus made disciples by training the 12 and the 72 to pursue the 1. Healthy churches are sending churches. For the kingdom, by the Spirit. Because everyone matters and no one is too far gone.

Questions to discuss with your team:

• In what ways have I intentionally pursued new relationships in the past quarter?
• Do our people feel truly known, cared for, and valued?
• How have we trained our people to share their faith with the people in their lives?

4. Discipleship Engine

If you’ve ever been to an NHRA drag race, you know that the engines in those cars are so powerful that when they rev up the RPMs… you feel it in your soul. In the same way, healthy disciple-making churches are powered by soul-stirring, prayer-fueled Discipleship Engines.

Like an internal combustion engine that makes fire through the properly timed combination of spark, air, and fuel, a Discipleship Engine sparks transformation through the properly timed combination of outreach, assimilation, and discipleship multiplication. A fully-functioning Discipleship Engine, fueled by prayer and the Sprit’s power, is the not-so-secret of healthy churches.

Questions to discuss with your team:

• Are we effectively reaching the unchurched in our community? What’s been most effective?
• How clear is our process to help new people engage in the mission, vision, and discipleship pathway in our church?
• Have we identified measures (beyond attendance, giving, and baptisms) that allow us to determine if our people are growing as disciples of Jesus?

5. Compelling Strategic Vision

The Israelites were freed from slavery in Egypt and unleashed toward a new vision – a land flowing with milk and honey was their visionary destination. Nehemiah rallied the people to rise up and rebuild Jerusalem. Jesus painted a picture for the disciples: when you receive power, you will be my witnesses, not just to their friends and family, but to all of Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.

As the salt of the earth and the light of the world, the body of Christ is called to make a difference on this earth. Great leaders of great churches lead from and toward a compelling strategic vision. It’s a vivid dream of a mission-fueled future with a path embedded within. Often, this is what struggling churches are missing and need the most as it brings everything else together that needs to shift and change.

Questions to discuss with your team:

• What is our church’s vision for the next 5 years? Is it compelling?
• Do we have a clear, prayerful strategy for turning our vision into reality?
• How often do we celebrate and communicate progress toward our vision?

6. Leadership Flywheel

Bible Colleges and Seminaries are increasingly closing and struggling. The few that are doing well are often priced in such a way that graduates struggle with student debt for years or even decades afterward. It exposes a glaring need in the church – many churches need equipped ministers but are struggling to find them.

But healthy churches prioritize developing leaders from within. They develop a leadership flywheel: Recognize Potential (Identify) > Teach & Train (Equip) > Release to Lead (Empower) > Mentor & Reproduce (Multiply). As healthy church Leadership Flywheels build momentum, they can send these leaders out to start new churches, revitalize established churches, start parachurch ministries, and Christ-honoring businesses.

Questions to discuss with your team:

• Who are the next 3-5 leaders we’re intentionally developing right now?
• Do we have a clear, repeatable process for identifying and equipping leaders in every ministry?
• How confident are we that the church’s leadership base is stronger today than it was a year ago?

7. Intentional Church Systems

The human body contains 11 major “systems” that the Lord designed to sustain life. The circulatory system, respiratory system, digestive system, nervous system, muscular system, skeletal system, endocrine system, integumentary system, immune system, urinary system, and the reproductive system.

The Scriptures describe the church as the body of Christ. And healthy churches know that just like the biological systems of our bodies are essential to our health, intentional church systems are essential to our congregation’s health. Intentional Church Systems consist of things like: a calendar system, a planning & evaluation system, a communication system, a leadership alignment & development system, a giving & stewardship system, an outreach system, and an assimilation & discipleship system (or engine as described earlier).

Questions to discuss with your team:

• Which of our current church systems help ministry operate intentionally, and which ones cause friction?
• Do our systems help us multiply ministry or do they bottleneck it?
• If I stepped away for 30 days, would ministry keep moving forward without stalling?

8. Heat-Piercing Preaching

Jesus says that “out of the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks” (Luke 6:45). Obviously this is contextually about individuals. But I believe it’s also true of the church as a whole. The tone and content of the preaching flows from the heart of the local church. And when a church has a heart for inviting people into transformation in the name of Jesus, by the power of the Spirit, the preaching reflects that.

Healthy churches feature heart-piercing biblical preaching that encourages and challenges hearers to not just understand the Scriptures but to obey them. But then it goes even one step further: heart-piercing preaching teaches people how to obey every command of Jesus (Matt. 28:18-20). So this kind of preaching not only exhorts and informs, but it equips and trains. It’s the kind of preaching I teach you how to do in Sticky Sermons Academy.

Questions to discuss with your team:

• Do we regularly evaluate our preaching with trusted feedback from both leaders and congregants?
• Are sermons leading to tangible life change, surrender, and obedience, not just agreement?
• Do we see our preaching as an opportunity to not just proclaim the gospel, but to train and equip our people as disciples of Jesus? How?

9. Culture of Candor, Risk, and Love

The healthiest teams are not the ones that always agree, they’re the ones that can speak truth in love, take bold steps together, and remain deeply committed to one another and the mission – even through disagreement. In Acts 15, the early church leaders wrestled through sharp disagreements, but they did it in a way that preserved unity and advanced the mission.

Healthy churches are honest churches. Unfortunately, honesty in the church is often choked out due to a desire to “keep the peace.” But healthy churches know that settling for false peace is fleeting. Thriving churches don’t hide from reality or shy away from hard conversations. Instead, they take prayer-filled risks for the sake of living out the mission, together out of love for others.

Questions to discuss with your team:

• When was the last time we had an open disagreement as a team? How did that go?
• Are we taking bold steps of faith as a church, or are we just doing what’s safe and familiar?
• How are we actively fostering deep, loving relationships that can handle both celebration and conflict?

10. Equipping Emphasis

Many ministry leaders and pastors “do ministry” unbiblically. Because while Scripture lays out a description for those in leadership to equip the saints for the work of ministry, what a lot of “leaders” do is do all the work of ministry themselves. So, instead of a beautiful picture of all the saints contributing to the work of ministry, they’re spectators of a few trained ministers who do it all.

But healthy churches refuse to settle for this unbiblical model of ministry. Instead, they train, equip, and release everyday believers to serve in ways that fit their God-given gifts. Healthy churches are healthy because their people actively serve and courageously contribute to the mission and strategic vision of the entire church.

Questions to discuss with your team:

• Are there ministries that our staff is doing too much because we don’t have enough equipped workers to do the work of ministry of our church? What must we do to change that?
• What is our current equipping strategy to train and deploy our people for the works of ministry they’re called to do?
• Are we sending more people into ministry today (locally and globally) than we were a year ago?

Want some help?

If you’re ready to lead a healthy, disciple-making church without losing your soul, I’d love to walk with you. Inside Intentional Pastor University, I coach pastors through a proven 6-month process to assess your church’s health, clarify your vision, align your leadership, and implement the systems you need for long-term gospel impact.

The first step? Send me an email (brandon[at]preachandlead.com) and we’ll go from there. Together, we’ll help your church thrive for the next decade of ministry.

Or, start with grabbing your free copy of The Intentional Pastor Jumpstart: 3 Steps Intentional Pastors Use to Lead Their Church to Health.